


I see you lying next to me

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Background Yasha (Critical Role), Beauregard Lionett-centric, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Episode: c02e086 The Cathedral, Families of Choice, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Injury Recovery, Introspection, POV Beauregard Lionett, Partial Nudity, Post-Episode: c02e026 Found & Lost, Post-Episode: c02e098 Dark Waters, Protective Team, Resurrection, Serious Injuries, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23409862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Twice has Beauregard watched someone she loved stabbed through the chest, the once it happened to her, and the time that she really thought back about it and decided that enough was enough.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	I see you lying next to me

**Author's Note:**

> I've just realized that all three times someone on the Mighty Nein was stabbed through the chest with a long blade, Beau was involved?? Also, I think it's safe to say that Mr Mercer has a habit?? Anyway, I was listening to MCR this line made me think of Beau, but it was also missing Molly hours, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I'm actually really happy with this fic even though I was forced to edit it twice but STILL, I'm very proud. I hope everyone is staying safe and that you're still sane through all this chaos, and that this fic might provide a little bit of light to your life x

It had happened so fast, the first time, that Beau could hardly comprehend it.

The cart was within arms reach, so close that if she stretched out her hands as far as she could, she’d be able to brush her fingers against the metal of a cage hidden by a blanket of invisibility. Nott was already inside, she knew, and she had been so confident, so cocky, that what happened next was so out of the realm of possibility that Beau felt like the world was falling out from under her feet.

There was blood. So much blood, seeping from the glave buried deep into the lavender of Molly’s tattoo’s chest. Lorenzo was like a mountain, looming over Molly with a satisfied smirk on his face as blood pooled in Molly’s mouth. She might have screamed. She knew that Keg had and that Nott, stuck in the cramped space between the cages, wailed so loud that it hurt her ears. Caleb hadn’t moved, but he had stared at Molly’s twitching body as if he had seen it many times before.

Beau just couldn’t stop… staring at him. She couldn’t will her body to do anything. All she could do was stand there, stiff, as Molly slowly stopped moving and his head fell to the side and the blood that had been steadily pooling in the back of his throat poured down his face, and she watched, in real-time that felt like slow-motion, as the life left his eyes.

“Respect,” Lorenzo chuckled, as he yanked the glave from Moly’s chest. All Beau could focus on was the sound of the gushing wound squelching as it left his chest, and the way his body jerked one last time. The coat he loved so much was stained forever, the cold ground beneath him seeping with it, and once the carts were finally out of sight and Beau could force her cold, stiff legs to move, she stumbled over to his side and was joined closely by the others. Even Keg. Beau couldn’t even summon the emotion to be angry at her. Not yet, at least.

When they buried him, clawing at the hard earth with nothing but their hands, she was closer to the gash in his chest. Molly had always been scared, yes, and maybe not all the scars were ones he gave himself, but this new one, permanent and strange, was just plain wrong. Even if Beau hadn’t seen it happen, she could never justify it in her mind how something so ugly and gruesome could ever belong on a man like Mollymauk Tealeaf, a man so beautiful and wonderful and lovely in every way. She hated that this would be her last memory of him.

Caleb was nudging her, and Nott was already walking away, holding her crossbow closer to her chest. Keg was watching her, sadly, but she didn’t dare get any closer. 

It hurt, to look at Molly, so cold and still when he was the exact opposite during life. But death had a habit of taking things away, of stripping people to their bare essentials, to breaking things down to nothing. She shouldn’t have been as shocked as she was. The way they lived, it was very likely that one of them would die sooner or later.

She had just expected it to be her, not Molly.

The last thing she wanted to think about was what they were going to tell the others when they eventually found them. How they would react. Every example she played in her mind didn’t turn out pretty.

Eventually, she gave in to Caleb’s insistent tugging and she stood from Molly’s grave, his coat hanging from the make-shift cross, waving in the wind. She made sure that all of Molly’s things were tucked neatly away with the rest of her things before she turned away for good. Molly’s periapt was swinging at Caleb’s neck beside another cord. Keg and Nott were already gone, disappeared into the woods, and Beau could hear the clanking of Keg’s armour no matter how quietly she was trying to walk.

She tried to get the image of the bloodied gash marring purple flesh out of her head and replace it with the sight of the vibrant hand-made coat waving like a beacon in the wind, dappled with freshly fallen snow.

* * *

It was almost too good to be true, and even now, Beau found herself reeling at the fact that she was here, standing right beside her, so close that Beau could almost touch her.

Yasha was almost back, so close to returning to their little team, their make-shift family, but Obann was still so close, and Yasha’s eyes were still too… empty.

For a while, it was tit-for-tat, they were trading blows with each other as if they weren’t good friends and Beau thought that it was a pretty even fight despite Yasha having a sword and Beau just depending on her fists, but before she knew it, she was on her back on the ground, blinking stars out of her eyes, as Yasha slowly moved to stand over her, legs on either side of her body, her face angled in such a way that Beau could feel the newly shed tears hitting her face.

A small, radical part of Beau’s mind tried to break through the fear by reminding Beau that she had been wanting this for a long time, Yasha standing over her with Beau on her back, but the other, more afraid part of Beau’s mind tried to rationalize, rightly so, that she had never imagined Yasha standing over her with the wickedly cruel Skin Gorger held tightly in two hands, the tip so sharp that Beau could hardly keep it in focus.

Even like this, Yasha was wonderful to behold. There was new paint on her face, and her eyes were shrouded in darkness. Her hair, tangled and dirty and matted from so long travelling through the wilds, cascaded down her shoulders in braided bundles, and Beau had always wanted to be looked at with the intensity that Yasha was looking at her now. She wore new armour, curved and rusted, the breastplate almost horned, and though it was probably useful, Beau hated how different and wrong it made Yasha look. 

But Beau didn’t have much time to think about that, because then Yasha was raising the blade high above her head, and Beau watched, helpless, as the blade barrelled towards her chest, and suddenly Beau was back in the fields of the Glory Run Road, and instead of the marble floor of a church it was cold hard earth, and instead of a sword it was a glave, and instead of Yasha, it was-

The pain was so intense that Beau’s vision actually faded out for a second. Her hearing dimmed, and the air was sucked from her lungs. And the sound… the cracking of bones and squelching of the blade through blood and flesh, the heavy _thunk!_ of the sword piercing straight through her body and hitting the marble beneath her. Through the haze, she thought she could hear it crack and split.

There was still tears pooling in Yasha’s eyes and rolling down her cheeks, and when the blade was pulled out of her, slowly and painfully, her vision darkened for the last time, and she met Yasha’s eyes for just a moment as he turned away to face Fjord, leaving her discarded on the ground like a gift nobody wanted.

She was told later that Caduceus had broken the charm, and that Yasha had come back to them suddenly and slowly, and that the thunder had shaken the cathedral with the force of the Stormlord’s rage. Beau wished that she could have seen it, the way Yasha looked back-lit by lightning through the shattered stained glass window, her back and neck arched as she roared into at the sky and the storm roared back.

Yasha wouldn’t look at her, after, when they were waiting in the king’s reception area. Beau couldn’t blame her. Well, not about the actual act of stabbing her, she wasn’t in control, but the scar was pretty gnarly, even with all of Jester and Caduceus’s healing afterwards. It was long and jagged and the newly healed skin looked like a burn. Her insides hurt, even though she was no longer at risk of bleeding out or suffering from a punctured lung, something still rattled inside her when she breathed in too deeply.

She wondered, vaguely, when she finally removed her robes and looked at herself in the mirror, if this was how Molly had felt when Lorenzo pierced the glave through his chest, and if they had been able to bring him back and the wound would have been able to heal if their scars would have been much the same.

At least now she had something to connect herself to her dead friend other than the money she had taken and spent long ago.

In the distance, the storm still roared.

* * *

The Ball Eater was supposed to be their safe haven, their home away from home, the only place they could go to escape all the people on shore who had some vendetta against them. On the ship, nobody could touch them, nobody would dare. 

So when Beau was woken up in the middle of a deep sleep by the sound of the alarm bell ringing, footsteps running back and forth above her on the deck, the sound of people shouting and screaming and fighting and the weird crackling-hissing noise, she never would have expected that someone had been brave enough- or foolish enough- to attack them while they sailed in the middle of an armada of the Empire’s most faithful warships.

But then she heard the commotion from up above, the sound of Orly’s bagpipes and heavy footsteps shuffling across the deck, Marius’s yelping as he did his best to stay alive and get some hits in of his own at the same time, and she realized that Fjord was upstairs, alone, fighting whatever this new threat was on his own, and she forced her way past these new assailants and maneuvered around her friend’s rebuttals until she reached the stairs.

Fjord was nowhere to be seen at first, but then from the corner of her eye she caught sight of the flash of deep seaweed green from the highest part of the mast, and she felt a bead of hope fester in her chest. But then, out of nowhere, she saw the familiar sickly green burst of energy from the captains quarters, and for a moment all she could do was stand there and watch as a mutated fish-fiend emerged from the shadows with its eyes fixed solely on Fjord.

Honestly, Beau didn’t remember much about the fight, and what she did remember was blurred and panicked around the edges, but what she knew without a doubt was that when Fjord fell from the mast, unconscious, to land on the hard deck with a _thwack!_ that not only did she scream, but she left Orly and Marius alone to rush to his side.

She didn’t make it very far.

Vaguely, through the haze, Beau had seen the flash of Yasha’s sword glinting in the faint light, and the top of Caduces’s pink hair as he fought to get up the stairs. Caleb was there at some point, too. Maybe Jester.

But when Beau watched that familiar dark blade plunged into Fjord’s chest, curved at the top and crusted in barnacles, all she could think about was the same feeling in her own chest, how Molly had looked lying prostrate on the ground, how everything had been taken away from her so fucking fast-

It would be different, this time. She knew it would be. Jester was there with them, and Caduceus… Beau had never seen Caduceus so fucking angry and not for the first time was she glad that he was on their side. But it’d be fine. They’d fix him. They’d fucking fix him.

There was no way in hell that any of the Nein was going to forgive Uk'otoa for this, and no way they were going to lose this fight. Caleb was there, Yasha, Caduceus, Jester. Beau. Beau was right fucking there. Close enough to touch him yet so god damn far. It was raining. She wasn’t sure if she was so wet because of the rain or her tears. At this point, she didn’t really care.

Suddenly, the ship was calm, and in the distance, other warships were sounding the alarms at the sound of the now finished battle. Jester was finished healing Orly, and she sank down at Fjord’s side, sobbing quietly into her sleeve. Veth trudged up from below decks. Yasha’s head was down, her face obscured by her hair, resting her hands on the pommel of her sword, the blade buried into the slats between the deck. Caleb was there, looking horrified at the wound, and Beau knew that he was reliving the same thing she was. Caduceus held a diamond in his hand and looked at Fjord through his bushy eyebrows as if Fjord was suddenly the only thing his world contained. 

He would be fine, Fjord would be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’d better be fucking fine-

When Beau gets done with him, Uk'otoa won’t even know what fucking hit him.

* * *

Once the peace talks are over and everything had calmed down a little bit, Beau retreated below decks to her quarters for a private moment away from the prying eyes of the others and settled heavily on her bed. Nailed down, was a floor-length mirror, which didn’t mean much considering the height of the cabin was just enough to confine her height and not much else. She wondered how Caduceus dealt with it.

When she finally took the time to remove her vestiges and wrappings from around her arms and torso and dumped them on the floor beside her bed. The large gash down the middle of her chest was still a fleshy-pink colour. It didn’t hurt anymore, not like it did back then, but sometimes it got tender like her body was trying to force her to relieve it. It ached now, now that everything had quieted down and she was no longer running on adrenaline and spite.

She twisted and dragged her hands across the back of her neck to pull her hair up and away from the design etched into her skin and held it all at the top of her scalp with a heavy hand. Molly’s tribute, glistening green in the torchlight, took up the entire nape of her neck. She didn’t regret it one bit. It was really the only thing she had of Molly’s to remember him by. Well, of course, that and the scar.

In the angle of the mirror, Beau could see the doorway that led into the gun deck. Veth and Caleb had walked past a couple of times, but they hadn’t stuck around. Caduceus ducked his head in just to check on her, but once he was assured that she was safe in her room, he smiled to himself and left her be. But now, when she least expected it, Yasha stood at the threshold to her room, both her swords slung across her back, leaning against the doorframe. “You look busy,” she said, “I can come back later.”

“Nah,” Beau lowered her hand from tracing over the marred flesh of her chest and dropped it back down to her lap. “I don’t mind being naked in front of people. It’s freeing, actually. You should try it sometime .”

A small smile curled up at the corners of Yasha’s lips as she took a step into the room. “I will keep that in mind.” Her head tilted, her hair cascading down one shoulder in tangled strands. “Your tattoo looks nice. It healed well. I… well. I think Molly would have loved it.”

“Thanks,” Beau lifted her arms and flexed a little bit, and the tattoo glinted with the movement. It wasn’t really to show off, but she didn’t miss the way Yasha watched her very closely. “I’m very proud of it. It’s the only thing I have of his now. I didn’t take anything for myself before we buried him.”

But Yasha wasn’t looking at the tattoo anymore, instead, she was looking at Beau’s reflection in the mirror, and the long, wicked scar on full display for the first time since it happened. When Beau realized, she lowered her arms. “I’m sorry,” Yasha said quietly. “I don’t know if I’ve said that to you yet.”

“You definitely have.”

“But I’m not if you know how much I mean it,” Yasha took another step into the room, and Beau turned to face her full on. Yasha reached a hand out as if to touch it, but thought better of it, and pulled her hand back. “I… I’m so sorry. I never… if I was in…”

Beau placed a hand on Yasha’s arm. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t worry. I forgave you ages ago. You know, I didn’t even blame you when it happened. Honestly, it’s alright. I actually think it's kinda cool. How badass does it make me look?”

Yasha didn’t speak for a few long moments. “This seems to be a running trend, huh? Our team getting stabbed in the chest.”

“Yeah,” Beau said. “Not one I like to repeat, though.”

“Fjord’s fine, Beau,” Yasha replied. “You know that, right? He’s fine.”

Honestly, Beau didn’t know what to say to that, so she turned around and picked her top from where it was discarded on the ground, and ran her fingers over the fabric. Her rough, dry skin caught on the strands. “I uh… I should probably get dressed. Just in case we need to go somewhere in a hurry, you know.”

“I’ll let you do that then,” Yasha said as she backed out of the room. “I’ll see you on deck.” she left the room and reappeared again a second later, sticking her head through the door, one hand on the wooden frame. “And Beau?”

“Yeah?”

“You look good.” this time Yasha was definitely gone, and she didn’t reappear again.

Beau sat there for a little while longer with nothing but her reflection and the roiling of the sea outside the ship to keep her company with her thoughts. She could hear the hustle and bustle of the crew in the hallway. Fjord shouting orders. Orly’s heavy footsteps. She should be up there with him, it was her job as the first mate, but Fjord had it handled. Even though he died a couple of days ago, he was already back on deck giving orders to the crew and keeping the ship in working order. He didn’t really need her help, but it was nice that he pretended. It was more effort than her parents ever gave her, anyway.

Yasha was right- there did seem to be a running trend with their group. Molly and Lorenzo. Beau and Yasha. Fjord and Uk'otoa. All marked the same way, all with the same grotesque looking scar that felt like it would never heal no matter how many potions they drank or spells that were pumped into them. Maybe it was more the concept that hurt than the wound itself. They couldn’t be sure. Molly would have some odd philosophical standpoint on it, something complex and intricate and wordy that they could never hope to understand, but he would make it all better for just a moment in that strange way of his.

The unwanted, the forgotten, and the abandoned. Who’s who was anyone’s guess. Really, each title applied to all of them individually at some point or another and could continue to apply for the rest of their lives. Somehow, they had found each other, and those words didn’t cut so deeply anymore.

Beau had seen someone she loved stabbed through the chest twice now, and once it even happened to her by someone she cared deeply about. Well, three was enough. Three was the limit she was willing to reach. What if it happened to Caleb, or to Jester, or to Caduceus? Beau would never forgive herself. If the risk was just her, if it was just her who woke up every day with the possibility of being wounded or even killed, maybe she wouldn’t have worried as much. But this was her team. Her family. She was sick and tired of seeing them get hurt in the same way that Molly was killed. She was sick and fucking tired. Enough was enough.

She decided, right then and there, sitting on her bunk in the gun deck of the Ball Eater, that she was never going to let that happen ever again, and she was going to use any means necessary to make sure of it. 

In the words of Mollymauk himself, ‘be the chaos you want to see in the world’, and Beau was more than ready to cause a little chaos for the ones she loved, and leave every place better than she found it in the process. It was the very least she could do.

**Author's Note:**

> (My favourite part is the Molly bit just FYI ok thank you)


End file.
